Appendix VIII: Methodology for Calculating World Share of Autism Research Publications

Publications are counted on a "whole-count basis," where each collaborating country on a given publication was credited one count. For example, if there are three authors listed on a publication, two from the US and one from UK, the publication would be counted twice, once for the US and once for the UK. To determine the country's annual share, each country's count is divided by the total number of publications in that year. This method shows the full contribution of each country without penalizing for international collaboration.

An alternative method is the fractional approach, where each participating country receives a fraction of the count. Using this approach would be appropriate for other types of analyses in which the purpose is to highlight countries that publish singly versus those that publish mainly as a result of international collaborations. A fractional approach would show a lower volume for countries that publish only collaboratively and would not accurately reflect the total number of publications from each country as intended in the current analysis. In 2010, approximately 20% of ASD research articles result from international collaborations, and the whole count methodology works well for the ASD field at its current stage, but in the future, if the field becomes increasingly collaborative across international borders, the fractional count method may be more useful.

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